Greencopper’s technology enhances the experience at Osheaga and festivals in 19 countries

Michael-Oliver Harding, Special To THE GAZETTE07.28.2014

Gwenaël Le Bodic, CEO of tech company Greencopper: The company has achieved global credibility for the creation and design of smartphone apps for music festivals — they have over 180 clients in 19 countries, including the Montreal Jazz Festival.

MONTREAL — What do Osheaga, MUTEK, Pop Montreal, the Montreal International Jazz Festival, and Piknic Électronik have in common, besides contributing to our city’s enviable reputation as a global music hub? Montreal’s event-throwing cognoscenti partnered with local tech company Greencopper to devise mobile applications that aimed to be intuitive and customizable for smartphone-wielding music lovers who expect cutting-edge apps to power their festival experiences.

Launched five years ago, Greencopper — headquartered in Montreal with satellite offices in the United States, France and Denmark — now bills itself as “the world’s largest provider of innovative technology solutions to music festival organizers.” In addition to the Quebec festivals it still counts as clients, the company has added prestige events such as Chicago’s Pitchfork Music Festival, Spain’s Primavera Sound and France’s Les Eurockéennes to its mushrooming roster of 186 clients in 19 different countries.

“Montreal is a great incubator for these types of projects; it’s a very attractive place to develop startups and new technologies,” Greencopper CEO and founder Gwenaël Le Bodic said during a recent interview at his company’s St-Henri headquarters in the former RCA Victor factory that was once the biggest record maker in the country.

Le Bodic, a Frenchman who moved to Montreal after completing a PhD in telecommunications in Scotland, first developed a prototype for the iOS and Android applications in 2009 through partnerships with Pop Montreal and France’s Transmusicales.

“The concept of mobile apps was popping up for festivals but only experimentally. I’ve always been a product-oriented person, so I wanted to explore sizable markets, and I could tell (with the Pop and Transmusicales experiences) that we could develop something for very large markets. We were the first organization to focus on music events, creating a generic product that met 80 per cent of festival requirements, with a shopping list of additional features they could then customize according to their needs.”

At the outset, Greencopper’s main hurdle was a financial one, given the steep costs of developing a sophisticated technology that could sate festivalgoers’ boundless appetite for information at their fingertips — everything from stage schedules and maps to metadata such as artist bios and like-minded music recommendations. Instead of seeking investors, the telecom-schooled Le Bodic reached out to the Société française du radiotéléphone, or SFR, one of France’s largest mobile carriers, about sponsoring nearly 20 music events across the country by way of a mobile event app.

“We needed to distribute the costs across a large base, and not just have a handful of festivals bear the financial burden,” Le Bodic said. “When we did the app for the jazz fest, for instance, we went to No. 1 in the app store’s music category, so sponsors saw that it could be a really great marketing tool.”

SFR loved the idea and quickly signed on, ensuring that festivalgoers attending events covered by the sponsorship would have access to a free product.

Greencopper has since developed a slew of analytics and metric tools to help organizers better understand who attends their events, while giving sponsors a handle on what exactly they’re investing in. Greencopper has also been very hands-on in educating brands about proper positioning — how sponsors should avoid being too intrusive and strike the proper tone with festivalgoers.

“At the outset, we were selling the technology, whereas now we sell the technology but with an expertise and a portfolio of events, which is much more interesting for us,” Le Bodic said.

So how did Greencopper succeed in such a cutthroat, rapidly changing market? “Many music tech startups fail because these are very disruptive technologies, so it’s quite difficult to grasp,” Le Bodic said. “For us, the key elements were great technology, a strong knowledge of the music industry and an international team.”

It also doesn’t hurt that most of Greencopper’s 25 Montreal-based employees are just as passionate about music as the clients they serve.

“The customer-facing people in our organization meet with festival organizers all the time,” he said. “They’re really music-oriented people who go to NxNE and Osheaga, and I think working here allows them to contribute to festivals in a different way. It’s really important to establish a trust relationship and that’s very difficult in this market if you’re considered an outsider.”

At the Osheaga Music and Arts Festival, which Le Bodic considers one of Greencopper’s “key playgrounds for experimentation,” the company will test out the latest in Bluetooth-enabled iBeacon technology at Jean-Drapeau Park. In a nutshell, these low-powered signal transmitters trigger smartphones that come within a predetermined range, sending push notifications to their owners.

“For example, nearby mobile users could receive a message letting them know about an after-party. Instead of flooding everyone with spam, even those who decided to stay home, with this technology you’re only targeting people who are nearby,” Le Bodic said. “We have been experimenting a lot with this — iBeacon has tremendous potential.”

That’s a sentiment echoed by Philippe Kyprianou, Senior Digital Strategist at entertainment promoter Evenko which runs Osheaga. Greencopper’s expertise in building festival apps gave Evenko the edge when the time came to develop an Osheaga app in 2012, according to Kyprianou.

“They had a good understanding of where we were at and where we wanted to go,” he said. “We really build our strategy with in-house marketing and web teams in partnership with Greencopper, so we can offer festivalgoers the best possible event. Our integration of iBeacon this year is taking that one step further, so we can better understand which stages work best, how people move around the space and what we can do to improve the overall experience.”

Technological breakthroughs aside, Greencopper is gearing up to radically change the way it does business after having built a robust technological tool adopted by close to 200 festivals. Le Bodic spoke of it in terms of reaching a certain plateau with the system’s scalability.

“As our client roster continues to expand, it’s becoming difficult for us to build personal relationships with clients. To supplement what we do, we’ll be providing the same technology but as a self-service solution to a greater number of festivals — thousands instead of hundreds,” he said.

Set to launch this fall, the goLive self-service solution created by Greencopper will allow organizations to use the company’s technology, providing them with a customizable template online without having to be in direct contact with the company.

“The technology has reached a level of maturity where we can deliver it without much guidance, account management or design,” he said, hinting at how clients have adopted and picked up on the platform’s many features.

“This will make Greencopper even more alluring to brands — our platform will serve thousands of festivals, affording huge visibility to sponsors. We’ll keep our signature events, of course, but the exponential growth we are forecasting will come from goLive.”

The Osheaga Music and Arts Festival takes place August 1-3 at Jean-Drapeau Park in Montreal.

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.

Share

Greencopper’s technology enhances the experience at Osheaga and festivals in 19 countries

Almost Done!

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.